7 - Cognitive Approaches to the History of Emotions and the Emotional Dynamic of Literature

Summary

The history of emotions and cross-cultural intelligibility

Emotion, and its connection to cognitive functioning, has come up again and again in the preceding chapters, which is unsurprising given the reliance of poetry on affective experience. Wordsworth famously observed that poetry has emotion as its essence: ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. More recently, cognitive scientists have begun to analyse with their own concepts and methods this uncontested capacity of literary texts to represent, simulate and cause emotions, thereby facilitating a dynamic line of inquiry for the cognitive study of literature. Any consideration of this combination of emotion and poetry, or literature more broadly, has two related dimensions, both of which are essentially cognitive and can be analysed via specifically cognitive approaches: how emotion is represented in literature, and how literary texts can trigger emotional reactions in readers. When we consider texts created or at least written down over a thousand years ago, as in the case of Old English poetry, further considerations arise from these two intersections: is the experience being represented in these medieval texts the same as similarly named emotions experienced by us today; and more broadly, to what degree are emotions intelligible cross-culturally. To explore these issues, the discussion below, pp. 170–5, revisits two texts already treated above – Wulf and Eadwacer and Beowulf – from a new perspective, the History of Emotions.